Published 20th Mar 2025, 13:36 GMT

A woman in her thirties sets off to climb a Munro. She's a capable, experienced climber, and has arranged to meet a fellow enthusiast , known to her only through internet conversations. She then falls from a cliff path and is killed. Her companion disappears. The police are prepared to log it as an accident, and why not? They know nothing of the of her companion, not even his existence. However, DS Max Craigie, hero of five previous novels, learns from a coastguard friend that there have been six similar deaths, all quite recent, all involving women. Suspicious, surely? Mac "feels a fluttering in his stomach." "What," his friend wonders, "if someone is targeting lone women climbers and shoving them off cliffs?" The dead women all have something else in common, too: they are all blondes.

It's a fine, enticing opening. Max alerts his team. His foul-mouthed boss, Inspector Ross, is sceptical at first, but soon persuaded when Max is backed up by the female members of the team. There is a good deal of the now customary police badinage, much of it tiresome. Max himself has divided loyalties: he is devoted to his work but his wife Katie is in the later stages of pregnancy. Still, he will juggle his commitments.

We know from the start who the killer is. We see him in action and know he is called Mikey. Well, there's nothing wrong with readers being ahead of the cops; it's a convention and, here, a gripping one. It is soon evident that Mikey is no lone killer. These murders are even darker than one at first supposes. There's a team at work here, too.

The world being as it is today, much of the investigation is carried on smartphones and via other hi-tech means; likewise communications between the murderers. No doubt this is how police investigations are pursued today. If the villains were less disgusting you might feel sorry for them. But they are as nasty as can be, as is revealed when a computer wizard begins to get to the heart of the matter, deep in the Dark Web.

Lancaster has written an action-packed novel, completely gripping except, perhaps, when it takes the narrative too far into the finer details of hi-tech policing. The secondary plot - Max's concern for his anxious wife - is at first somewhat irritating, as it interferes with the main action, but is in fact justified, offering a reminder that horror may exist more or less side-by-side with normal relationships and sentiment.

This is a fashionably long novel and, as in all long novels, there are some tedious passages. After a slow start, however, it gathers pace. The villains - incels with a hatred of women - are a suitably unsympathetic bunch, cruel and wicked inadequates, but only one of their number, an ex-cop, is of any great interest.

Lancaster is a fine storyteller and, even if the the reader's credulity is sometimes strained almost to breaking-point, this is a very enjoyable book. It is, in fact, a very good example of what used to be called Airport Fiction: the good end happily and the bad get what any reader will think they deserve, which is all very reassuring.

When Shadows Fall, by Neil Lancaster, HQ, £16

When Shadows Fall, by Neil Lancaster review: 'an action-packed novel'

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